Duplicate content - what to do?
-
Hi,
We have a whole lot of articles on our site. In total 5232 actually.
The web crawler tells me that in the articles we have a lot of duplicate content. Which is sort of nonsense, since each article is unique. Ah, some might have some common paragraphs because they are recurring news about a weekly competition.
But, an example:
http://www.betxpert.com/artikler/bookmakere/brandvarme-ailton-snupper-topscorerprisen
AND
http://www.betxpert.com/artikler/bookmakere/opdaterede-odds-pa-sportschef-situationen-pa-vestegnen
These are "duplicate content", however the two article texts are not the same. The menu, and the widgets are all the same, but highly relevant to the article.
So what should I do? How can i rid myself of these errors?
-Rasmus
-
So! Have now made some changes.
I have removed the large number of links at the bottom and a single widget on the right. It seems to have lowerede the level of noise on the page.
We brandish our articles with keywords (but mostly new ones since the feature is new) such that only relevant articles are linked (in a widget which appears when relevant articles are found).
This change should cut it, right?
-Rasmus
-
Rasmus,
Your description and keywords tags are exactly the same on both pages.
The description should be a summary of the content of each individual page
If you fix that, it may go some way towards fixing the problem.
If that doesn't help, then consider adding more text to those stories
- say a little more about each competitor, or at least the leader or the top 3.
Another thing you could consider is using a different template for that type of page, so you don't add all that stuff under the HR tag, and maybe drop off something from the right column, so the page is a little bit shorter and the story will be a larger percentage of the text.
You also have a lot of inline javascript and a lot of external javascripts.
I don't know if the bots or the ranking algorithms care, but it would be a lot nicer if you consolidated some of that.
-
Hey Rasmus,
The menu, widgets e.t.c all count as part of content as they are page elements, so ofcourse they would be considered.
This situation is abit tricky, however if you think you can merge them do so, maybe add slightly more content to each page; otherwise do nothing.
Just make sure and see whether both pages are ranking for the appropriate keywords.
Thanks,
Vahe
-
That is almost duplicate content. The % of the unique content on the two pages you've posted as example is small - only the actual content is different - the rest of the site wide boxes and boiler plates are the same.
So matematicly the difference in those two pages is very small.
The good thing is that you have the article in a good real estate location on the page - amnd that is good.
If your "score" as far as page views, Bounce rate, time on page, loyality is good then no need to worry about the crawler telling you about the duplicate issue. if the Bounce rate, time on page etc doesn't look good then yes, you nee dot worry about it.
My suggestion will be to cut out some or most of the boiler plate boxes in your site structure - it doesn't help you, it doesn't help your readers but it dose harm you with all those links per page as far as number (% of links vs text) and to be honest I am not 100% sure it helps your users with that aggressive approach: a lot of options.
Also there is a good approach not to use the same target for the link in the article as it doesn't counts - only the first one is taken in consideration as far as anchor text - as far as seo. If it has a good CTR then keep it but remember that even if only one counts as sending SEO signal (anchor text and link love) it dose count as far as number of links per page.
The bottom line is that if you cut about 50% of the boiler plates in those pages you will gain a lot of advantages for both the SEO side and you would also help your users (usability, navigation etc).
You don't have to take my advice for granted - do this for some of the articles and monitor ctr, serps for them and so on to see the improvements.
Hope it helps. If it didn't hopefully someone else will also post an opinion
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does hreflang restrain my site from being penalized for duplicated content?
I am curently setting up a travel agency website. This site is going to be targeting both american and mexican costumers. I will be working with an /es subdirectory. Would hreflang, besides showing the matching language version in the SERP´s, restrain my site translated content (wich is pretty much the same) from being penalized fro duplicated content? Do I have to implement relcannonical? Thank ypu in advanced for any help you can provide.
On-Page Optimization | | kpi3600 -
I'm looking to put a quite length FAQs tab on product pages on an ecommerce site. Am I likely to have duplicate content issues?
On an ecommerce site we have unique content on the product pages (i.e. descriptions), as well as the usual delivery and returns tabs for customer convenience. From this we haven't had any duplicate content issues or warnings, which seems to be the case industry-wide. However, we're looking to add a more lengthy FAQs tab which is still highly relevant to the customer but contains a lot more text than the other tabs. The product descriptions are also relatively small. Do you think this will cause potential duplicate content issues or should it be treated the same as a delivery tab, for instance?
On-Page Optimization | | creativemay0 -
Impact of rogue keyword in content
I have a page that is optimised - title, URL, content etc for the chosen keywords. However, within the content are some batches of bullet point text that has repeated text throughout. So for example I have 5 instances of my chosen keyword within the content and 24 instances of the two word text within the bullet points. Does this kind of scenario have any impact on ranking?
On-Page Optimization | | MickEdwards0 -
Two different domains with the same content
Hi all, I just figured out that my client has two different domains with the same content, so the site will be penalized by Google: www.piensapiensa.es www.piensapiensa.com Should I do a 301 redirection from one domain to the other one using the htaccess file as usual chosing one of them as canonical? redirect 301 piensapiensa.es www.piensapiensa.com? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
How Can I Fix Adobe Bridge Photo Galleries and Duplicate Content?
I have used the Adobe bridge program for a number of photo galleries on a remodeling site and it is showing a large amount of duplicate titles, etc. Is there an easy fix to this? anyone?
On-Page Optimization | | DaveBrown3330 -
Is duplicate content harmful? Example from on my site
I'm not talking about content copied from another site but content unique to a site being used on several pages. I have a delivery tab that has precisely the same content as another product page. This content is on four product pages and the dedicated delivery page. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Brocberry0 -
Can internal duplicate content cause issues?
Hello all mozzers - has anyone used nitrosell? we use them only because their inventory connects to ours epos point but because they have thousands of 301s on our domain we are getting duplicate content because different sizes of products (we sell womenswear) are creating seperate URLS so we are duplicating both content and URLS - im curious as to whether anyone has experienced simillar problems that have affected their SERPS? Best wishes, Chris
On-Page Optimization | | DaWillow1 -
Panda Update and Website Content
According to the Panda Update information, website content that is or was written to help with SEO is now not the best idea, but content that is very informative and interesting is the way to go. But if you have an Ecommerce Website how can you write informative bookmarking content, if each product you sell is very similar, and the information for the product is just details about the product. Its hard to write good content for an eCommerce website. We have 300+ products that are all similar, but if we would write content about each product, it would be similar and not interesting to read. People just want to purchase the product, not read a bunch of content. How do websites that sell many products and not content driven websites rank well in search?
On-Page Optimization | | hfranz0